Koplin Del Rio is pleased to announce its eighth solo exhibition of work by Fred Stonehouse (b.1960).

Silent Treatment is a group of paintings and works on paper which serves as a materialization of the artist’s unique perspective of the space between language and active communication. For the artist, growing up in a family with many deaf relatives, the idea of “silent speech” was not an oxymoron, but an organically understood reality. The often half-formed figures in Stonehouse’s latest work weep, bleed, sweat and send words into the ether, never quite achieving direct connections. Residing in an amorphous state of becoming, or dissolving, their efforts to reach each other conceptually are analogous to their difficulty in achieving physical form.

Says the artist, “I have had a long and abiding concern with non-classical forms and the idea of awkwardness and narrative as a vehicle for psychological honesty.”

Very much as in a dream, the narratives of Stonehouse’s work suggest the mythic as seen through the lens of the everyday, powerfully influenced by surrealism, theology, outsider and folk art, underscored with wit and brutal psychic exposure.

Bio
Born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Fred Stonehouse earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Wisconsin at Madison where he now teaches. His work has been shown in numerous galleries as well as several museum group exhibitions, including recent shows internationally in Germany and Italy, and nationally at The Laguna Art Museum, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, San Jose Museum of Art, The Art Center in Wisconsin, and the Cincinnati Art Center in Ohio. He currently resides just outside Milwaukee. Stonehouse is the recipient of many prestigious awards including The Joan Mitchell Foundation award, the Wisconsin Institute of Visual Arts Lifetime Achievement Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts, Midwest Fellowship award. Fred Stonehouse has shown with KDR since 1997.